30 December 1873 • London, England (MS: NN-B, UCCL 01020)
London, Dec. 30.
After all, I find I am not going into the provinces—(I got the paragraph—many thanks.)1explanatory note Every hall & theatre is full of holiday shows. We can’t even get a church to talk in till near the end of January, & I can’t wait that long. My chief business here is already accomplished (Eng (getting English copyright on my novel), so there is nothing to keep me from sailing at once, if I chose.2explanatory note I lecture only 3 more times on British soil, & 3 nights in New York, & then I retire from the platform permanently.3explanatory note I think ⒶemendationI will try to eke out a meagre subsistence upon my permanent annual income of £8,000, & try to sit at home & in peace & do nothing. (Don’t tell anybody that.) But if there is a fool in the world, I think I am that person. A sensible man lectures only when butter & bread are scarce.
I am to appear on the scaffold 3 more times in England, as I remarked a moment ago—on the 8th of January at Leicester, & on the 9th & 10th at Liverpool—& then sail for home on the 13th in the Parthia.4explanatory note If you’ll only run over there, the first time you get a chance, I’ll treat you the best I know how, & give you the best bed in the house as long as you stay.
I was in Ventnor, Sunday, & hunted up Miss Florence.5explanatory note She is a most attractive & very natural & girlish sort of girl. (I hate artificial girls.) I saw all the family—exceedingly pleasant people they are, too.
Remember me kindly to Mrs. Fitz Gibbon & the family, & believe me—
Evidently Fitzgibbon had sent a clipping from the 23 December Darlington Northern Echo of the item Clemens had asked him to publish (see 21 Dec 73 to Fitzgibbon, n. 3click to open link).
Clemens’s surviving letters since July make no mention of his other purpose (in addition to the publication of The Gilded Age) in revisiting England: to collect material for a book (see 6 July 73 to Fairbanksclick to open link). It is not clear when he abandoned the project, but he had definitely put it aside by 25 June 1874, when he wrote to the New York Evening Post to deny a report that he was “at present engaged in writing a work on English manners & customs”:
Some day, but not just at present, I hope to write a book about England, but it will hardly bear so broad a title as the one suggested above. In such a book as that, I could not leave out the manners & customs which obtain in an English gentleman’s household without leaving out the most interesting feature of the subject. ; They are the next thing to perfection; admirable; yet I would shrink from deliberately describing them in a book, for I w fear that such a course would be, after all, a violation of the liberal courteous hospitality which furnished me the means of doing it. There may be no serious indelicacy about eating a gentleman’s bread & then printing an appreciative & complimentary account of the ways of his family, but still it is a thing which one naturally dislikes to do. (Daley)
In addition to the two pieces Clemens had probably written in the winter of 1872–73 (see pp. 258–59), he produced several manuscripts that originally could have been intended for the book. Two of these, “Rogers” and “Property in Opulent London,” were included in Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One, where they were explicitly identified as “From the Author’s Unpublished English Notes” (no such notes appear in the surviving English journals) (SLC 1874, 13–16, 28–29; Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journalsclick to open link). Two others, “The ‘Blind Letter’ Department, London P. O.” and “‘Party Cries’ in Ireland,” survive in manuscript (the first at CtY-BR and the second at ViU) and were published in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (SLC 1875, 262–63, 279–82). Clemens probably wrote the first of these shortly after visiting the post office, either in the company of Edmund Yates or through an introduction from him, since Yates had been head of the missing-letter department for a decade before his resignation in 1872. This visit may have taken place during the second half of June 1873, when Yates was in or near London reporting on the shah (17 or 18 June 73 to Young, n. 1click to open link). Clemens almost certainly wrote the second piece in Belfast, between 28 August and 1 September 1873. One last manuscript, “One Method of Teaching in England,” remained unpublished: it was based on a visit Clemens made to an English school, apparently with Stoddard, sometime between late November 1873 and mid-January 1874. It includes a four-page introduction in Clemens’s hand, together with thirteen pages of sample student essays copied by Stoddard. Clemens included this piece in the table of contents he drafted in February 1875 for Sketches, New and Old, but he later changed his mind and deleted it (ET&S1, 623, 626; SLC 1873).
The New York lectures did not take place (see 17 Dec 73 to Redpath, n. 2click to open link).
Fitzgibbon wrote the following item for the Darlington Northern Echo, where it appeared on 1 January:
I regret having to inform you that the people of the North of England and Scotland are doomed not to make the personal acquaintance of “Mark Twain’s” richly original humour. His agents have been prowling about the country endeavouring to get a place wherein he might lecture, and they report that every hall and theatre in the country has been pre-engaged for holiday shows till the end of January. “Mark Twain’s” American engagements prevent him remaining so long in England. His chief business in England was to get copyright for his novel. That has been accomplished. As he cannot get any place in your neighbourhood or in Scotland to lecture, all that remains for him is to fulfil his remaining engagements. He sails for America in the Parthia on the 13th, and after lecturing three times in New York, he retires to private life. He has made up his mind, notwithstanding his splendid success, to never more appear on what he calls the public scaffold. So well he may, being in the enjoyment of a private annual income of 8,000l. The great surprise is that he ever bothered himself with lecturing. (Fitzgibbon 1874)
Florence Stark, not further identified.
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L5 , 539–541; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 130, excerpts; AAA/Anderson 1936, lot 127, excerpts.
The MS was offered for sale in 1936 as part of the collection of Abel Cary Thomas. By 1939 it was owned by businessman William T. H. Howe (1874–1939); in 1940 Dr. A. A. Berg bought and donated the Howe Collection to NN.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.